Original Short Story: Six Dusks, Seven Dawns

Authors Note: There is a companion poem to this short story. Check it out here. 

Dawn again. It has been six times dusk and dawn seven since I began.

The hammock’s hard to get out of. It’s the kind that hangs just taut enough between two trunks or boughs or poles or whatever that it doesn’t slam into the ground. I land on the nearest branch; I spent the night high in a tree breathing cool air.

The heat will begin soon.

Six dusks and seven dawns and I still haven’t needed a fire. I still haven’t seen a real animal. I’ve eaten nothing with fewer than six legs.

That’s fine. Good, really.

But not entirely true. I tried to eat a newt I found. Might as well have been an insect with the amount of meat it held. I was so hungry I ate what I could without cooking it. That was four dusks ago. When I thought I would return home.

Gotta keep going. I’m not dead yet.

The journey is only supposed to last nine days. Six dusks and seven dawns later, I don’t expect to see darkness again. Forward is safer than backward. That’s how I want it. The problem is that the further I go, the less lucid I become. It’s unlike any journey I’ve taken before.

Start walking. Go, I think. I don't.

There was the one with all the ice. The air felt so good there – like it was thinner but fuller. Here the air is so thick but so empty. It’s impossible to get a satisfying breath. On the ice I had a four-legged partner, too.

I don’t miss it though.

This has its own charms, after all. The air is close and the clothes I have left are sticking to my every body part. I could do without the mosquitos, but they add an ambience that would be hard to get elsewhere. Like the time with the yellowed grass up to the waist that went on for miles. There were mud-holes and bugs and a silver compass that I never found and the machete and the cloven path it made.

I sit down, planning for the trek and wishing for the machete.

If I’m going to take the final fall, where should it be? I don’t know that this is the right adventure. Should it have been at sea, or in catacombs, or in the bowels of ancient temples? Can this bog be the right place? It’s so hard to move here. Where does that fall go? Would I feel it?

It’s good to not know.

I get up and keep half walking, half swimming, half falling, half living to the next tree, the next rock, the next tree, the next rock. If I keep going, I’ll make it. If I keep going, it will be okay. If I stop, I fall. If I stop, I don’t know myself.

His father had been an adventurer, too. He was always taking risks. He would try to goad the bull for fun, but instead of being just out of range, as he intended, the thing would snap his femur, or he would be fixing the roof without a net or a tether or a ladder and he would fall, or he would eat a wild animal to feel alive and become ill for a week.

When he was out, maybe five years before his death and twenty years before his heart stopped beating, he would fight criminals and then steal something. He would duel a congressman and then go hunting. He would find the shadiest bar and buy a beer for the most interesting person. He would go walking for a month and return rich without explanation. He did all that and it was never fatal. It was coming home that killed him.

The best adventurers don’t return.

That’s really what I’m doing now, as I walk through the bog. No matter my father, no matter this sun just beginning to dry out the earth, I’m making myself one of the best adventurers. I can swim, walk, trot, swim, crawl, swim, trot, walk, swim right up until I can’t do any of it anymore.

So I will.